Chat

What chat is

Chat is the widget in the corner of your website. It runs the full AI: knowledge base, policies, workflows and order lookups, the same engine that answers your email. A chat conversation is a ticket like any other, so your agents see it in the helpdesk and can take over at any point.

It is usually the channel where automation pays off fastest, because the customer is on your site, mid-decision, and expects an answer in seconds rather than hours.

Getting it onto your site

Chat is configured per market under Settings → Chat. Each market has its own chat widget, its own key, and its own settings, which is what lets one team run a Danish and a German storefront with different names, tone and links.

• Shopify 🛍 The widget can be installed for you. See How to embed your Chat widget on your Shopify store.
• Any other site 🌐 Paste the embed snippet for that market into your template, once, before the closing body tag.

Note: Zuzana checks whether the widget is actually live on your site and shows the result on the chat settings. If it says the widget was not found, the snippet is missing, on the wrong domain, or blocked before it loads. That check is the quickest answer to "is it just quiet, or is it broken?"

What you can set per market

• Active 🔘 Whether the widget answers at all in this market.
• Assistant name 💬 What the assistant is called in the chat. Leave it empty to use the team-level name.
• Chat avatar 🖼 The picture in the chat header, again overriding the team default for this market only.
• Show AI disclaimer ℹ️ Whether the chat says out loud that the customer is talking to an AI. On by default.
• Escalation forward email 📧 Where a request for a human is sent when nobody is available to take it in the helpdesk.

The opening flow

Rather than an empty message box, chat can open with a small menu: a message and a handful of buttons, each leading to another message or another set of buttons. Track my order, returns, delivery times, talk to a human.

There are two kinds of destination, and the difference matters more than anything else on this page.

• A static answer 📄 The node's text is shown as written. Good for something that never changes, like your returns window in one sentence.
• A question sent to the AI ✨ The node's text is sent to the assistant as if the customer had typed it, so they get a live answer grounded in your knowledge, workflows and order data. Good for anything where the real answer depends on the customer or on today's facts.

Note: When in doubt, use the second kind. A canned answer in a flow is a policy nobody maintains: it keeps being sent long after the underlying fact has changed, and unlike an article or a policy, nothing else in Zuzana knows it exists.

When a customer wants a human

Asking for a person is a normal part of a chat, not a failure. The conversation becomes a ticket in the helpdesk for an agent to pick up, and if no helpdesk agent is available, it is forwarded to the escalation address you set for that market so it lands somewhere a human actually looks.

Good habits

Keep the opening menu short. Four buttons that cover most of your traffic beat twelve that cover everything. A customer who does not see their case in the list just types, which is fine.

Write the buttons in the customer's words. "Where is my order?" gets pressed. "Order status enquiry" does not.

Check the widget after a theme change. A redeployed storefront is the most common way a working widget quietly disappears, and the embed check is there precisely for that.

Watch the first week of transcripts. Chat is where you discover the questions you did not know customers asked, which is the cheapest source of new articles and policies you will ever get.